If it's for sound, consider some PCI cards. There are models that work quite well with late era DOS games.

I've thought about that, but would prefer an ISA slot as well for use with a GUS or whatever oddity I want to throw at it.

Hell even, a LGA775 or Socket 478 board with an ISA slot and PCIE I'd be interested in (not sure if 478 ever had PCIE though).

And on the topic of PCI cards... I assume it's the SB PCI 128? Is it just a TSR that loads for this? I'm mainly interested in playing apogee/3dr, id, raven titles (basically the shareware shooters).

My main idea is to build something that's basically pushing it to the maximum limit under DOS and use XP as the OS, and possibly 98SE if it's stable.

This board here looks like it would be a good one to use as Socket 478: http://www.ebay.com/itm/MS-6571-v-2-0-Intel-8 … =item2c97b4adcf

Anyone have any comments on it? 2 DDR slots, so I guess I'm limited to 1GB (can live with that, but would prefer 2GB)... and would need a SATA PCI controller card (can live with this too).

I like to use the Vortex 2. I've used in my recent "10 reasons for a Pentium 4" project. I used a ~ 2 GHz CPU, but you can go up to 3.4 GHz without any dramas 😀

Or use an Yamaha YMF-724. I actually have begun loving this card and prefer it over any Creative based PCI soundcard.

You may run into problems with DOS games and chipsets past the Pentium 4/Athlon XP era. Newer chipsets lost the ability to assign IRQs and DMAs properly in DOS like an ISA card can. This affected my Diamond MX300 Vortex 2 card. I tried for days to get DOS games to work in real-mode DOS on my Athlon XP system that had an nVidia nForce 2 chipset. That chipset, unlike others from that era(KT133A), lost this legacy ability. I could only run DOS games out of Windows 98 and even then, had many problems with sound. I'd suggest reading more about how your chipset handles IRQs/DMAs before using a s939 system.

Good luck!

...And I just found a thread about this very topic! From a brief scan, there seems to be good info in it:PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

Okay, yeah I remember reading about that newer boards may have ISA but they don't support DMA properly from ISA cards making sound cards useless in those setups. Was wondering if anyone can specifically recommend a board.

Can only speak for Intel, basically any board with the 865 chipset will work with Vortex 2 cards. Pentium 4 3.4 GHz should give you plenty of performance.

Yeah I had an i865 chipset a good while back with an Abit board. Worked really well for years until the caps took a dump and back then I didn't really know it.